Abstract

This article deconstructs NUFDI’s recent announcement of an ‘Iranian Folk Congress’ as a rhetorical manoeuvre within a wider strategy of epistemic destabilisation and soft cartographic engineering (Hooman, 2025). It situates the initiative within the ideological framework of American-Israeli think tanks, particularly the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), whose partitionist lexicon and ethnofederalist prescriptions seek to recode Iran’s civilisational plurality as irreconcilable ethnic division. By examining the linguistic shift from linguistic diversity to fabricated ethnonational identities, the article exposes the deployment of identity politics as a pretext for the dismantling of national cohesion under the guise of democratic renewal. Drawing on recent analogues, including the ongoing disintegration of Sudan, it argues that Iran is being rhetorically prefigured for post-regime fragmentation along tribal and provincial lines, with nominal allegiance to His Imperial Highness (HIH) Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi used as a veneer of legitimacy. The article contends that such projects do not represent internal demands, but externally choreographed designs, rehearsed through pseudo-academic interventions, diaspora proxy actors, and strategically ambiguous terminology. What is at stake is not merely cultural recognition, but the neutralisation of Iran’s sovereignty through imperial cartographies masked as liberation.

 

 

Introduction

NUFDI’s latest announcement, The Birth of the Iranian Folk Congress, must be understood not as a spontaneous gesture of cultural recognition but as the continuation of a much older ideological script. Its principal author, formerly a member of the Central Council of the Islamic Association and a signatory to the 2018 collective letter distancing itself from both Iranian nationalism and Irānshahriān statecraft (Collective of signatories, 2018), has long advanced a re-theorisation of Iran as a ‘historically constructed, fundamentally multicultural’ polity. That letter, co-signed with other pro regime reformist-faction embedded within Islamic student organisations, explicitly rejected both cultural-nationalist and civilisational-state paradigms.[1] It asserted instead a vision of Iran as a plural society whose cohesion must not rely on Persian linguistic or historical continuity, but on decentralised frameworks insulated from state authority. This argument echoes the federalist-Marxist discourse of the Tudeh Party, which under Soviet patronage first articulated a programme of ethnic plurality not as cultural emancipation, but as geopolitical leverage for territorial disintegration. These continuities are not incidental. They constitute the deep structure of today’s ethnofederalist rhetoric, repackaged for diaspora consumption and channelled through the diplomatic gloss of rights and recognition.

 

It was the Tudeh Party, under Soviet patronage, that first weaponised the rhetoric of ‘ethnic plurality’, not to safeguard cultural expression, but to justify territorial disintegration, particularly in north-western Iran. Its support for the Azerbaijan People’s Government and the short-lived Republic of Mahabād in the 1940s was not a defence of minority rights, but a geopolitical manoeuvre aimed at partitioning Iran for absorption into the USSR’s sphere. These precedents are not peripheral, they form the discursive foundation of today’s ethnofederalist narrative, now repackaged in the diaspora as cultural inclusion.

 

What is consistently omitted from such narratives is the fact that Iran’s first constitutional charter, the Qānūn-e Asāsī-ye Mashrūṭeh (1906–07), crafted through mass national mobilisation from all corners of the country, contains no mention of qowm (ethnic group) or aqwām (ethnicities). The Iranian nation, in its foundational civic grammar, was constituted as a political-territorial unity, not a coalition of tribal blocs. To superimpose contemporary ethnic essentialism onto this historical continuity is not an act of pluralism, it is erasure. What now parades as grassroots inclusion is, in truth, the latest phase of a long war of disintegration.

 

On 29 October 2025, a self-described coalition of tribal and ethnic representatives issued the founding declaration of the ‘Iranian Folk Congress’ under the auspices of the Washington-based National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI). In the declaration, they announced their commitment to national solidarity, ethnic rights, and unity under HIH Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. The statement, predictably couched in the vocabulary of democracy and plurality, appears benign on the surface. Yet, on closer scrutiny, it is the latest and most linguistically engineered operation within a decades-long campaign to fracture the Iranian nation from within. This Congress, constructed in the image of Euro-American pluralist tokenism, is not a civic instrument. It is an ideological artefact. And its emergence must be situated squarely within the broader blueprint long advanced by foreign-aligned actors under the euphemism of regime transition.

 

NUFDI, despite its branding as an Iranian-American civic platform, functions as a soft-power conduit for US-Israeli strategic interests in the region. Its alignment with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative pressure group long embedded in the machinery of US foreign policy, is neither incidental nor passive. Over the past several years, NUFDI has positioned itself as a public face of ‘Iranian opposition’ while laundering the geopolitical imperatives of Washington and Tel Aviv into the lexicon of rights, freedoms, and federal solutions. Its staff includes former affiliates of FDD and voices closely linked to the architects of the Abraham and Cyrus Accords, each of which sought to subordinate Iran’s regional agency to Israeli-American security doctrines through proxies dressed in diplomatic garb.

 

In March 2023, NUFDI published the Interim Post-Transition Plan for Iran (IPP), a document that effectively proposed the soft federalisation of the Iranian state in the immediate aftermath of regime collapse. It presented this scheme as an ‘emergency roadmap’, laying out a programme of decentralised governance on ethnic and tribal lines. This proposal, roundly critiqued by scholars and civic actors for its ethnopolitical incoherence, relied on the sleight of hand typical of imperial subversion: using humanitarian rhetoric to repackage cartographic violence. The IPP marked a pivotal moment in the externalisation of Iran’s future. It formalised a political template that did not emerge from the exigencies of Iranian civic life, but from the strategic imagination of foreign capitals. What the IPP rehearsed bureaucratically, the Folk Congress now performs symbolically.

 

This is not a rupture, but a sequence. The same actors, the same institutions, the same geopolitical alignment. The language has softened, but the architecture remains. What has changed is not the project, but its optics. No longer explicitly advocating federalism, the new discourse fetishises cultural diversity while quietly institutionalising tribal segmentation. It presents unity as an emotive theme, while its structure performs the opposite. This rhetorical pivot mirrors other imperial operations across the region, where Balkanising logics are disguised as transitional governance and pluralist reconstruction. The Iranian Folk Congress, far from being an organic formation, is a discursive instrument. It exists not to unify the nation, but to recode it. Not to honour its plurality, but to partition it under the guise of ancestral restoration.

 

It is not accidental that the Crown Prince’s name is once again invoked. His inclusion in this enterprise functions not as affirmation, but as armour. NUFDI and its affiliates have routinely shielded their structurally separatist designs behind a carefully cultivated association with HIH Reza Pahlavi. By doing so, they gain legitimacy without accountability, borrowing the aura of unity while pursuing agendas that corrode it. The risk is not merely reputational, but historical. By aligning his name with these initiatives, whether through passive association or strategic silence, the Crown Prince is being conscripted into an architecture whose outcomes directly contravene the very vision of national integrity he claims to preserve. The irony is bitter: what the Shah named Iranestan as a warning in exile, his son may be remembered as having facilitated by proxy.

 

To understand the Folk Congress as an isolated gesture is to misunderstand its purpose. It is the latest in a series of ideological rehearsals for the ethnic reconstitution of Iran. The cartography may not yet be drawn, but the lexicon has been drafted, the actors placed, and the narrative in circulation. What follows is not analysis for its own sake. It is a naming of the operation, a confrontation with its method, and a refusal to allow Iran’s civilisational coherence to be rendered negotiable.

 

Iran’s civilisational integrity has never been predicated on ethnic uniformity. What has defined it, across millennia, is a model of integrated plurality, where linguistic and regional variation was subsumed within a shared civic, legal, and literary grammar. This is not ethnic federation; it is civilisational cohesion. The current federalist discourse, in contrast, imports the colonial epistemology of ethnic governance: it mistakes the presence of dialects for the absence of unity, and misreads historical variation as tribal fracture. The difference is not cosmetic. One is endogenous pluralism; the other is partitionist simulation masquerading as inclusion.

 

To be clear, this instrumentalisation does not imply that the Crown Prince himself is the architect or ideologue of these agendas. Rather, it reveals a more dangerous form of reputational capture, one in which his historical legitimacy is deployed without his strategic consent, and often without his full awareness. Yet the repetition of this pattern, where federalist, fragmentary, and foreign-aligned projects consistently shield themselves behind his name, now demands public clarification. Silence, however noble or apolitical in intent, risks being read as tacit endorsement. The burden of disavowal now lies not with his critics, but with those who invoke his name to mask the dismantling of the very idea of Iran.

 

 

The Reframing of Linguistic Plurality as Ethnic Fragmentation

The core manoeuvre in the campaign to fragment Iran is epistemological. It begins not with policy, but with the deliberate misnaming of the Iranian nation. The false premise of a ‘multi-ethnic’ state, repeated in FDD briefings, NUFDI statements, and pseudo-academic texts such as Brenda Shaffer’s Iran Is More Than Persia, is not a descriptive gesture. It is a strategic imposition, an imported analytic designed to overwrite Iran’s civilisational grammar with the conceptual detritus of failed imperial federalisms. It performs the foundational lie of partitionist discourse: that a nation constituted by multiple languages must, by definition, consist of multiple nations.

 

The opening claim of the so-called Folk Congress article, that Iran has, for “at least fifteen centuries”, comprised a harmonious coexistence of fixed ethnicities such as Azeris, Kurds, Baluch, Arabs, Lors, Gilaks and Mazanis, is not a statement of fact but a deliberate act of historiographical falsification. It projects modern ethnonyms, most of which were politically constructed in the twentieth century, backward into a civilisational past that did not organise itself along ethnic lines. Iran’s historical cohesion was never premised on an ethnofederal structure, but on a shared political culture, administrative rationality, and civilisational continuity rooted in the Persianate tradition. To collapse linguistic plurality into essentialist ethnogenesis is to fabricate a narrative architecture designed to justify partitionist blueprints. This is not historical illiteracy, but the strategic weaponisation of invented identities to normalise the disintegration of national sovereignty under the guise of diversity.

 

Therefore, Iran is not a federation of tribes. Nor is it an accidental aggregation of ethnic blocs held together by central coercion. It is a civilisational nation, historically constituted through shared cultural memory, legal continuity, and religious synthesis. From the Achaemenid period to the Qajar era, Iranian identity has never been reducible to race or dialect. What unites its peoples is not bloodline, but participation in an inherited and evolving cultural universe. This reality is not abstract theory; it is historically demonstrable. As I argued elsewhere, Iran’s cultural and political coherence derives not from ethnic homogenisation, but from a civilisational logic wherein Persian operated as a lingua franca without being an instrument of ethnonational dominance (Suren-Pahlav, 2023a). It was the medium of jurisprudence, poetry, theology, and resistance, adopted freely across regions, dynasties, and faiths.

 

Shaffer’s intervention, by contrast, replaces this continuity with an ethnographic fantasy. She and her patrons at the FDD construct a binary schema: ‘Persians’ and ‘non-Persians’, with the latter cast as marginalised victims of cultural hegemony. In this schema, linguistic variety is reinterpreted as political oppression, and the alleged remedy is always the same: federalism. But this is no innocent proposal. It is the operational vocabulary of disintegration, rehearsed in every interventionist project from Iraq to Syria. When pluralism is re-coded as tension, and when that tension is attributed not to state violence but to cultural domination, the logic of partition is already in motion.

 

The IPP white paper, published by NUFDI and endorsed by several of the same actors now organising the Folk Congress, adopts this very structure. It presents a plan for managing the post-regime transition period in Iran by delegating authority to ‘ethnic representatives’ and regionally segmented bodies. Under the guise of democratic reconstruction, the plan proposes to reconfigure the nation along identitarian lines. No justification is offered as to why this model, already catastrophic in the cases of Yugoslavia and Iraq, should be imported into a state with no indigenous tradition of ethnic federalism. Instead, the authors perform the discursive trick common to all externally scripted transitions: they confuse identity with governance, language with sovereignty, and historical trauma with justification for institutional rupture (Suren-Pahlav, 2023b).

 

Even the linguistic categories themselves are falsified. The term ‘non-Persian’ has no basis in Iranian historical thought. It exists only in the foreign policy literature of American think tanks and separatist propaganda. It implies that Persianness is a hegemonic core and all else deviation. The intent is not analytical. It is cartographic. By naming diversity as disunity, these actors set the stage for redrawing internal boundaries in ways that have nothing to do with the lived experience of Iranians. They deploy the aesthetic of pluralism to legitimise a logic of rupture.

 

Yet Iran’s linguistic plurality has never been incompatible with national cohesion. The Azerbaijani language, for instance, has been spoken for centuries across northern Iran without producing an independent Azerbaijani nation. Its speakers were central to the Constitutional Revolution, to anti-colonial resistance, and to the institutional scaffolding of the modern state. They never required a separate ‘congress’ or federal unit to participate in national life. Their Turkic identity did not contradict their Iranian one. Such dualities are only rendered impossible by those who refuse to see them as real, who project imported notions of exclusivist belonging onto a context they neither inhabit nor understand.

 

The idea that language must map onto sovereignty, or that dialects represent discrete political entities, is not native to Iranian discourse. It is borrowed from the post-imperial crises of Europe and applied to Iran in the service of fragmentation. The Bernard Lewis Plan, the Cyrus Accord, and now NUFDI’s ethnic congress, all share this same ideological skeleton. They transform difference into contradiction, and contradiction into justification. They do not see Iran as a civilisational continuum, but as a site of unresolved tribal grievance waiting to be partitioned.

 

This is not merely conceptual violence. It is prelude to institutional aggression. The reframing of Iran as a ‘multi-ethnic’ state paves the way for treating its dissolution not as collapse, but as transition. It inverts the moral grammar: national defence becomes chauvinism; resistance becomes denial; unity becomes tyranny. In this script, sovereignty is always suspect, unless fragmented.

 

Let it be stated clearly. Iran is an ethno-nation. It is a nation with multiple languages, faiths, and customs. But its nationhood is not up for negotiation, and its plurality is not a pretext for imperial management. The false universalism of federalism, when applied to a civilisational polity such as Iran, is not reform. It is ruin (Suren-Pahlav, 1998).

 

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The Strategic Lexicon: Balkanisation in the Language of Rights

The foundational manoeuvre of the current ethnofederalist discourse is conceptual inversion: it does not oppose pluralism; it appropriates it. By masquerading as defenders of diversity, its architects have redefined inclusion as fragmentation, recoded cultural variation as political incompatibility, and presented tribal segmentation as a democratic ideal. This is not a misreading of Iran’s internal composition; it is a deliberate restructuring of meaning itself. The historic pluralism of Iran, dialectal, regional, theological, has never necessitated ethnic partition. It was housed within a civilisational logic that allowed for difference without dismemberment. The new lexicon evacuates this logic. It replaces it with an imported matrix of ethnic determinism that was never native to Iranian political culture, but now parades as reform.

 

Every imperial project has its glossary. In Iran’s case, it is a lexicon engineered to fracture, disarm, and reframe the defence of national coherence as authoritarianism. The terms circulate with surgical precision: ‘ethnic self-determination’, ‘cultural recognition’, ‘non-Persian nations’, ‘federalism’, ‘post-Persian pluralism’. Their surface is liberal, their structure imperial. These are not descriptors but instruments. They furnish the moral alibi for balkanisation, allowing imperial actors and their proxies to dress cartographic dismemberment in the garb of human rights.

 

What is offered, ostensibly, is inclusion. What is enacted, in substance, is rupture. This inversion is the defining tactic of the new linguistic warfare against Iran. The discourse no longer arrives as overt aggression, as it did in the colonial period. It arrives disguised as reform, pluralism, even decolonial justice. Its agents are not only foreign policy architects but credentialled dissidents, compromised academics, and exilic operatives bearing the vocabulary of international development. NUFDI’s recent Folk Congress is exemplary in this respect: a case study in how the vocabulary of diversity is conscripted to execute division.

 

The pattern is now familiar. First, the nation is re-described as a contested space. Its plurality is no longer a historical asset, but a liability. Then, its cultural lingua franca is recoded as supremacist. The Persian language is reduced from civilisational medium to colonial imposition. What follows is an open call for ethnic reorganisation. Local customs become proto-constitutions. Dialects are transformed into sovereignty claims. And the supposed solution, always delivered from abroad, is federalism. This term, long evacuated of its original philosophical content, is now a euphemism for soft partition, deployed to sanitise the dismantling of national cohesion in the name of justice.

 

The deeper function of this lexicon is not to describe Iran, but to prepare it for post-collapse management. The semantic field is carefully curated to ensure that any resistance to this script can be dismissed as nationalism, authoritarianism, or nostalgia. By shifting the conversation from historical continuity to constructed grievances, and by embedding identity claims within the framework of political entitlement, the discourse turns unity itself into a suspect category.

 

Brenda Shaffer’s role in manufacturing this narrative cannot be overstated. Her writings systematically recast the Iranian state as an artificial construct, assembled from incompatible ethnic fragments. By insisting on the primacy of ‘non-Persian nations’, she reifies difference and weaponises it. Her scholarship, as I have argued elsewhere, is not empirical investigation but ideological conditioning, embedded in a neoconservative project that has consistently sought to redraw the region to fit Israeli-American strategic interests (Suren-Pahlav, 2023a). The language of rights in her work does not emerge from Iranian realities. It is imported from think-tank policy sheets and engineered for strategic audiences.

 

This linguistic strategy finds its operationalisation in the IPP document and NUFDI’s recent institutional manoeuvres. The IPP retools the transitional moment as an opportunity for ethnic restructuring. It introduces an architecture of provisional governance that elevates ethnicity as the primary axis of representation. In doing so, it sets the stage for an irreversible shift: from civic nationality to tribal entitlements. This is not pluralism. It is state fracture by protocol.

 

What emerges is not a neutral vocabulary, but a field of linguistic traps. Each term is loaded. To defend sovereignty becomes to deny diversity. To assert civilisational continuity becomes to romanticise empire. To question ethnic federalism becomes to betray liberal values. The terrain is rigged. Language itself is conscripted into a war against meaning, in which even ‘unity’ is made to signify its opposite.

 

Yet no such linguistic inversion could succeed without the complicity of media, policy institutions, and compliant opposition figures. NUFDI’s use of the Crown Prince’s name, for instance, performs precisely this function. It offers symbolic cover for a lexicon whose structural implications undermine everything that name represents. To speak of ‘unity under the Crown’ while institutionalising ethnic fragmentation is not paradox. It is strategy.

 

What must be exposed, then, is the political economy of the language itself. These terms are not neutral tokens. They are ideological vehicles, operationalised through funding, media circulation, and policy translation. Their function is to make the partition of Iran both intelligible and palatable. The vocabulary of rights is not employed here to expand civic life, but to evacuate it. What is claimed as decolonial is, in fact, the language of new managerial empires.

 

We must recover the conceptual clarity to say what this is. It is not reform. It is not inclusion. It is not recognition. It is balkanisation, stage-managed in English, translated into Persian, and exported into Iran through the veins of media, exile institutions, and donor-funded platforms. The challenge is not merely political. It is semiotic. And until this lexicon is dismantled, the disintegration of Iran will proceed as if it were its salvation.

 

By seizing the vocabulary of pluralism, they obscure the reality of partition, and by calling it justice, they render opposition illegible.

 

 

NUFDI’s Folk Congress: Proxy Nationalism in Imperial Grammar

There is nothing organic about the so-called Iranian Folk Congress. Its structure, language, and choreography betray its origins: not as a national emergence but as a foreign implant. Formed under the banner of NUFDI, a Washington-based organisation with deep institutional ties to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and other actors of American and Israeli regional policy, the Congress represents the latest attempt to install a para-sovereign actor, crafted in exile, consecrated through Anglo-American developmental vocabulary, and presented as a voice for Iran’s ‘marginalised nations’. It is, in short, proxy nationalism.

 

The Congress did not arise from any verifiable political constituency within Iran. It appeared suddenly, issuing its ‘Founding Declaration’ on 29 October 2025, in language lifted wholesale from international liberal consensus: solidarity, equality, cultural rights, unity. Yet this discursive veil barely conceals the underlying logic. The Congress is built upon a logic of ethnopolitical segmentation. It names as its founding members a selection of tribal and ethnically defined organisations, ranging from the ‘Baloch Stability Front’ to the ‘Tabarestan Movement of Iran’, entities whose representational claims are neither substantiated nor transparent. No metrics, no elections, no mechanisms of accountability. Just names, declarations, and symbolic endorsements. This is not national dialogue. It is manufactured legitimacy.

 

The document’s most telling feature is its performative allegiance to HIH Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi. It asserts him as the ‘capable national leader’, even as the structure it proposes contradicts the very coherence of a unifying monarchy. The invocation functions tactically, not ideologically. It provides a national frame to an otherwise centrifugal project. The Crown Prince becomes an umbrella under which divisive initiatives can be laundered as patriotic. His name is deployed to disarm critics, to mask the foreign pedigree of the project, and to evoke continuity, even as that continuity is being severed by the very hands invoking it.

 

What is being staged here is not unity, but its simulation. The form mimics a constitutional process. The content enacts a cartographic agenda. And the structure is calibrated to echo international expectations: a decentralised, ethnically defined post-Islamic Iran that can be integrated into existing regional alignments without posing a sovereign challenge. As such, the Folk Congress performs two simultaneous functions. To its foreign sponsors, it signals a willingness to play by the script of minority rights and post-sovereign governance. To its domestic observers, should any be convinced, it offers the illusion of inclusion, reform, and ancestral revival.

 

But this dual performance is precisely the point. As I have argued in Deconstructing Iran’s Emergency Phase, the post-regime moment is being pre-scripted through the construction of such actors, para-state formations designed not to stabilise but to manage fragmentation (Suren-Pahlav, 2023b). The Congress is only the latest prototype. Its ideological scaffolding is indistinguishable from that of the IPP white paper, which advocated ethnic representation over territorial citizenship, and from Brenda Shaffer’s reduction of Iran into a federation of artificially suppressed ethnic nations (Shaffer, 2021).

 

The deeper strategy is not to create a national alternative to the Islamic regime, but to neutralise the very possibility of a sovereign Iranian polity after the regime’s collapse. The state must be hollowed out from within, its institutions replaced by councils of ethnic intermediaries, its historical memory fragmented into tribal myths. In this design, the Iranian nation ceases to exist as a cohesive subject. It is transformed into a managerial problem: a collection of constituencies to be arbitrated by NGOs, monitored by development agencies, and occasionally consulted by external powers. The Congress rehearses this logic. It speaks the language of independence while structurally guaranteeing dependency.

 

The terminology is familiar. From Bosnia to Iraq, from Libya to Syria, the language of folk representation and ethnic empowerment has been mobilised to usher in transitional chaos and enduring occupation. What is remarkable is not that this model is being applied to Iran, but that it is being fronted by actors claiming nationalist credentials. NUFDI, by placing itself at the helm of this initiative, is not asserting national leadership. It is offering national disintegration in a more palatable form.

 

This is why the aesthetic shift matters. Where the IPP white paper was openly managerial, the Folk Congress is folkloric. It wraps the same political architecture in softer language, uses ancestral rhetoric instead of transitional governance jargon, and appeals to cultural sentiment rather than technocratic planning. But the strategic logic is unchanged. Replace republican governance with tribal councils, sovereignty with decentralised assemblies, national memory with ethnic mythology. It is not accidental that many of the Congress’s supposed members have no known presence in Iran’s political life. Their value lies not in actual representation, but in their function as placeholders, ethnic avatars for a partitioned future.

 

It must be named for what it is. The Iranian Folk Congress is not a pluralist initiative. It is a soft-power operation, staged in the language of diversity, financed by proximity to imperial institutions, and designed to fabricate legitimacy for a post-sovereign political order. Its function is not to unify the nation, but to simulate its disintegration as a democratic inevitability.

 

It must be named for what it is. The Iranian Folk Congress is not a pluralist initiative. It is a soft-power operation, staged in the language of diversity, financed by proximity to imperial institutions, and designed to fabricate legitimacy for a post-sovereign political order. Its function is not to unify the nation, but to simulate its disintegration as a democratic inevitability.

 

Recent developments surrounding the Oslo-based assembly of ethnic activists, many of whom maintain documented affiliations with or ideological proximity to the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) terror group, further consolidate the argument that these movements do not emerge in isolation, but operate within a coordinated proxy theatre. The MEK, long reviled within Iran as an Islamist-Marxist cult and once designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, has since been repurposed as a mercenary instrument of foreign policy. It now functions as both logistical facilitator and narrative amplifier for diaspora gatherings that echo the same partitionist lexicon advanced by NUFDI and its Washington patrons. The convergence of language, timing, and personnel across these platforms is too calculated to be dismissed as coincidental. It reflects a strategic choreography aimed at producing a post-regime landscape defined less by civic sovereignty than by manageable ethno-political enclaves, each amenable to external mediation.

 

 

The Double Game: FDD, Israel, and the Manufactured Crisis of Cohesion

Behind the cosmetic language of rights, diversity, and transition lies a more deliberate set of actors, fully invested in the fragmentation of Iran as a strategic objective. Chief among them is the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a neoconservative policy machine embedded in the long arc of US-Israeli coordination over the Middle East. NUFDI, far from being an autonomous Iranian-American civic organisation, functions effectively as a civilian arm of this architecture, operating within its discursive perimeter, amplifying its narratives, and testing the softer packaging of its geopolitical ambitions.

 

The alignment is not subtle. FDD’s intellectual agents, such as Brenda Shaffer and Reuel Marc Gerecht, have repeatedly framed Iran not as a civilisational nation but as a ‘multi-ethnic’ territory on the edge of internal collapse. The premise is always the same: Persian culture is hegemonic, minorities are oppressed, and federalisation is the only democratic path forward. But this thesis is not supported by any serious ethnographic, historical, or political evidence from within Iran. It is imposed from above, manufactured in Washington, circulated through op-ed diplomacy, and reproduced by a willing network of proxies.

 

This strategy reached its most explicit formulation in the so-called Cyrus Accord, an unofficial but ideologically potent proposal that emerged in 2021 as a companion narrative to the Abraham Accords. The Cyrus Accord, as I argued elsewhere, did not seek peace, reconciliation, or regional stabilisation. It sought to prepare the ideological terrain for a post-Islamic Iran that would remain geopolitically neutralised and structurally fragmented (Suren-Pahlav, 2021). Cloaked in the myth of Cyrus the Great, the Accord offered a fabricated genealogy of Israeli-Iranian friendship as a pretext for a realignment that would serve Israel’s security doctrine at the cost of Iranian sovereignty.

 

The Accord’s authors, Len Khodorkovsky, Victoria Coates, and their circles, operate not as neutral diplomats, but as embedded agents of strategic subversion. Their objective is not the liberation of Iranians but the engineering of a political order in which Iran’s historical centrality is dissolved. In this design, Iran does not recover its civilisational role; it is reprogrammed as a managed federation of tribal and ethnic zones, each tethered to foreign patrons, international donors, and Western diplomatic oversight. The NUFDI-Folk Congress axis simply tests this formula in the language of exile activism.

 

Israel’s investment in this fragmentation is neither speculative nor reactionary. It is calculated. Since the early days of the Islamic regime, Israeli military and intelligence doctrine has regarded a cohesive, post-theocratic Iran as an existential threat to its regional hegemony. But the threat is not military, it is historical. A united Iran, secular or otherwise, represents a return to civilisational agency, one capable of resisting imposed alliances, transregional militarisation, and the epistemic dominance of Western foreign policy. To forestall that possibility, Israel has long backed fragmentation as a strategy of containment. As far back as the 1970s, its strategic posture aligned with Bernard Lewis’s plan for an ethnically partitioned Middle East, where religion, language, and tribal identity could be transformed into permanent frontiers.

 

What we are witnessing now is not a new policy but the next iteration. The so-called multi-ethnic Iran narrative, pushed through FDD publications, NUFDI statements, and academic shells like Shaffer’s writing, constructs the pretext for intervention without armies. It renders partition not as military incursion, but as moral necessity. It performs what the colonial empires once did with maps and mandates, now with language and platforms. The crisis of cohesion is not emerging from within Iran. It is being manufactured abroad, staged in English, and imported back into Iranian political discourse through self-styled opposition voices.

 

The most cynical aspect of this operation is its co-option of the Crown Prince’s name. By repeatedly invoking HIH Reza Pahlavi, these actors inject their initiatives with a borrowed sense of national legitimacy, while simultaneously hollowing out the institutional coherence that monarchy, constitutionalism, or republican sovereignty would require. He is transformed from a potential axis of unity into a rhetorical asset: summoned for optics, ignored in substance. The more his name is linked to these Balkanising initiatives, the more likely he is to be discredited among those who still view him as a symbol of continuity.

 

In this double game, everyone wins but the Iranian nation. The Islamic regime retains its internal propaganda arsenal, citing these projects as proof of foreign collusion. The FDD and its affiliates continue to seed instability narratives while appearing to support ‘democratic’ alternatives. Israel ensures that any future Iran remains territorially weak and politically fragmented. And NUFDI preserves its visibility as a credible opposition front while laundering the geopolitical designs of its sponsors.

 

This is not transition planning. It is colonial rehearsal. And the Folk Congress is not a civic experiment. It is a proxy theatre, rehearsing the aesthetics of representation while enacting the politics of division.

 

 

The Crown Prince and the Risk of Symbolic Neutralisation

To invoke the name of HIH Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi without institutional clarity or political coherence is not homage, it is instrumentalisation. In the current ideological theatre surrounding Iran’s future, his symbolic authority is being appropriated as strategic cover for projects that, if realised, would dissolve the very nationhood his forebears defended. The repeated invocation of his name by NUFDI, by the architects of the IPP plan, and now by the self-appointed Iranian Folk Congress, functions less as allegiance than as insulation. His legacy becomes a buffer between Balkanising agendas and public scrutiny. His presence, never operational yet always declarative, is used to shield initiatives from the charge of separatism while enabling their partitionist logic to proceed unchecked.

 

The irony could not be more cruel. The term Iranestan, coined by Mohammad Reza Shah as a warning against federal fragmentation, has returned, not as threat but as blueprint. The very centrifugal logic he foresaw as the ruin of the nation is now being advanced by those draped in royalist rhetoric and Western respectability. What the Shah condemned in exile, his son risks legitimising by silence. And silence, in this theatre, is never neutral. It is read as consent.

There is no ambiguity in the structural implications of these projects. The IPP plan, authored by figures closely linked to FDD and NUFDI, proposes the immediate federalisation of Iran following the collapse of the Islamic regime. It imagines a post-sovereign terrain governed by ‘local representatives’ selected on ethnic lines. The Folk Congress operationalises this vision culturally, by establishing a symbolic chamber of tribal and ethnonational delegates, an invented senatorial caste for a dismembered polity. And throughout, HIH Reza Pahlavi’s name is inserted as guarantor of unity, despite the fact that the proposed structures would eliminate the very basis of a centralised, unifying monarchy. This is not homage. It is sabotage by proxy.

 

By allowing his name to be attached to such initiatives without formal repudiation or institutional oversight, the Crown Prince places himself in a dangerous bind. To disavow them later risks alienating their constituencies and international backers. To endorse them openly would be to renounce any claim to national unity. In either case, his symbolic capital is being drained. What once functioned as a unifying force is at risk of becoming a referential shell, invoked for effect, hollowed in substance.

 

The danger is not hypothetical. Imperial strategy has always relied on symbolic figures to naturalise externally scripted transitions. From the Hashemites in Iraq to various Cold War-era exile governments, exilic legitimacy has routinely been instrumentalised to give partition or foreign management the appearance of continuity. HIH Reza Pahlavi, whether wittingly or not, is being positioned in a similar role. His historic gravitas is made to do ideological labour for plans whose structural DNA is not Iranian, but Atlanticist.

 

This symbolic neutralisation has further consequences. Within Iran, the association of the Crown Prince with federalist or ethnonationalist discourse plays directly into the propaganda machinery of the Islamic regime. It allows the regime to dismiss the opposition as foreign-sponsored, internally incoherent, and dangerously aligned with separatist agendas. For a nation already wounded by decades of internal decay and external siege, the threat of fragmentation remains a visceral fear. The memory of Iraq, Syria, and Yugoslavia is not distant abstraction. It is cautionary reality. If HIH Reza Pahlavi is perceived as a ceremonial figurehead to foreign-drafted initiatives, his credibility as a national symbol, monarchist or republican, evaporates.

 

This moment demands more than symbolism. It requires refusal. A refusal to allow civilisational coherence to be auctioned off in the marketplace of exile politics. A refusal to permit the name of the monarchy to be retrofitted to strategies of soft disintegration. A refusal to condone silence where clarity is required. For a figure so widely perceived as the last potential anchor of unity, neutrality is no longer viable. The Crown Prince must now choose between symbolic survival and strategic complicity. The cost of indecision is the irreversible reduction of his name from national inheritance to PR instrument.

 

Let it be said plainly. The Iranian nation does not need ancestral theatre. It does not need tribal councils masquerading as civic renewal. And it does not need royalist branding on projects conceived in the laboratories of foreign policy think tanks. What it requires is political clarity, historical fidelity, and the courage to say no, especially when yes is easier, more profitable, and more fatal.

 

 

Disarming the Partitionist Script: Strategies for Intellectual and Political Resistance

The disintegration of Iran is not an inevitability. It is an authored scenario, driven by curated discourse, proxy institutions, and linguistic sabotage. To reverse this process requires more than reaction. It demands the strategic disruption of its narrative architecture, the ideological de-legitimation of its operators, and the restoration of Iran’s civilisational grammar as the terrain of political imagination.

 

The first imperative is epistemic. The false dichotomy between civic cohesion and cultural diversity must be dismantled at the level of thought. The entire discourse of Iran as a ‘multi-ethnic state’ is built on Western cartographic imaginaries, not Iranian historical realities. As scholars such as Tavakoli-Targhi (2001) and Vali (2011) have shown, the notion of ethnicity as a fixed political identity in the Iranian context is both anachronistic and misleading. Iranian identity has historically been articulated through language, faith, and shared civilisational continuity, not through racial or tribal essentialism. Persian, as a literary and legal medium, never erased local dialects; it integrated them into a broader discursive whole.

 

The appeal to federalism as a solution to internal diversity is itself colonial in pedigree. It originates not from indigenous forms of governance, but from imperial administrative doctrines designed to manage difference through segmentation. In the British, French, and later American colonial theatres, local languages and tribal identities were not suppressed but exaggerated, converted into tools for indirect rule. Diversity, in these contexts, became a pretext for decentralisation, not as representation, but as containment. Applied to Iran, this logic recodes cultural complexity as political instability and offers federal fragmentation as the only viable solution. Yet Iran’s own pluralism, manifest in its imperial-republican synthesis, never required partition to achieve participation. Federalism, as now proposed, is not a local correction. It is a foreign imposition, dressed in liberal vocabulary.

 

This philological and historical complexity must be recentered in public discourse. Iran is a civilisational polity, not a federation of ethnic grievances. The revival of this paradigm is not nostalgic idealism, it is strategic necessity. The more the state is imagined as a colonial imposition upon ethnic subjects, the more susceptible it becomes to externally scripted balkanisation. Reasserting the civilisational model deactivates this logic. It disrupts the strategic function of the ‘minority question’ as a mechanism of fragmentation.

 

Second, institutional vigilance is required. NUFDI and its affiliated platforms must be confronted directly. Not with the vulgar nationalism the regime projects, but with critical inquiry: who funds these entities? Whose strategic doctrines do they echo? Why do their proposals map so precisely onto the disintegrationist logic advanced by FDD, Israeli think tanks, and Anglo-American development policy? These questions are not ad hominem. They are structural. Transparency is not a privilege; it is a political obligation, especially for those who claim to speak for a post-regime future.

 

Third, symbolic capital must be defended from co-optation. If the Crown Prince is to retain his place as a figure of national unity, he must publicly disassociate from initiatives that undermine sovereignty under the cloak of pluralism. Silence is not a neutral gesture. It is complicity through absence. A clear and unambiguous repudiation of ethnic federalism, tribal congresses, and para-political assemblies is now non-negotiable. Only then can the symbolic integrity of the monarchy, constitutional or otherwise, be preserved as a unifying force.

 

Fourth, we must dismantle the linguistic traps. The rhetoric of ‘non-Persian nations’, ‘marginalised ethnicities’, and ‘federal restructuring’ must be deconstructed not only for its factual inaccuracy, but for its ideological function. As argued in my critique of Shaffer’s work and the IPP framework (Suren-Pahlav, 2023a; 2023b), these terms are not neutral descriptors. They are operational tokens in a geopolitical script. The task is to develop a counter-vocabulary, one that affirms diversity without succumbing to partitionist frameworks. That vocabulary already exists, in the constitutionalist tradition, in the plural jurisprudence of Iran’s historical provinces, in the shared religious and poetic traditions that pre-date the nation-state.

 

Finally, we must internationalise the critique. The project of Iran’s fragmentation is not purely domestic. It is part of a broader imperial reflex. From the Levant to the Caucasus, the post-Ottoman and post-Soviet orders were restructured through ethnicised governance models, often imposed by the very actors now scripting Iran’s future. Scholars such as Mamdani (2001), Scott (1998), and Sluga (2013) have shown how identity politics can be co-opted to serve imperial and managerial ends. These comparative frameworks must be mobilised to demonstrate that Iran is not an anomaly, but a continuation of a much larger strategy of geopolitical micromanagement.

 

Disarming this partitionist script, then, is not merely a question of defending Iran. It is a refusal to allow a people, a culture, and a political tradition to be reduced to the chessboard of think-tank imperialism. It is a call to reoccupy the terrain of language, to reclaim the grammar of plurality without capitulating to the logic of fragmentation. It is, above all, a demand to assert that national unity is not reactionary, and that sovereignty is not a threat to democracy, but its precondition.

 

 

Invented Ethnicities and the Weaponisation of Vocabulary

The foundation of the ethnofederalist discourse rests not on anthropology or history, but on semantic manipulation. Its proponents retroactively impose categories such as ethnicity, ethnic nations, and ethnic minorities onto Iranian society, terms which have no genealogical continuity in Iranian civil, legal, or political thought. The very vocabulary of qom (ethnic group) and aqwām (ethnicities) is a Soviet linguistic import, introduced into the Iranian political lexicon by the Tudeh Party in the mid-twentieth century. Faced with the absence of an equivalent to Lenin’s ‘right to national self-determination of peoples’ within the Iranian social structure, the Tudeh functionaries embarked on a deliberate re-labelling of Iran’s tribal diversity, ʿashāyer, into pseudo-ethnic identities in order to manufacture the raw material necessary for partitionist agitation.

 

This discursive engineering was not simply an ideological misreading, but an attempt to create nations where none existed. The pre-modern Iranian social landscape was structured around urban citizens, rural populations, and tribes, not ethnic nations. Tribes such as the Qashqai, Bakhtiari, or Baseri were not bound by language or imagined race, but by shared economic life, seasonal migration, and political alliance. Their internal linguistic variety, often comprising multiple dialects and even languages, defies the ethnonational model entirely. Tribal cohesion was not ethnocentric; it was adaptive, functional, and transitional.

 

This is why the framers of Iran’s constitutional movement, figures such as Sattar Khan or Sardar Asad Bakhtiari, themselves hailing from tribal contexts, made no mention of ethnicity in the 1906–07 constitution. Their political vision was rooted in legal modernity and national sovereignty, not in ethnic segmentation. Had “ethnic identity” been a meaningful or foundational axis of Iranian political life, it would have been inscribed at the birth of the modern nation-state. It was not.

 

Today, however, this foreign-invented lexicon has been revived and repurposed, both by the Islamic regime and by its apparent adversaries abroad. The regime deploys the language of diversity and ethnic recognition as part of its divide-and-conquer strategy, especially in response to civic uprisings centred on rights, law, and national unity. Rather than respond to demands for citizenship, it emphasises sub-national identities, encourages the fetishisation of local dress, dialect, and invented “ethnic” grievances, and cultivates an artificial ethnoscape in place of a national polity.

 

Organisations such as NUFDI now reproduce this same discourse under a different flag. Their insistence on describing Iran as a federation of ancient “ethnicities” is not merely false, it is politically instrumental. It reframes the Iranian nation as a fragile compact of warring identity groups, in order to normalise the language of fragmentation and prepare the conceptual terrain for soft dismemberment. As one commentator put it, “NUFDI still cannot distinguish between plurality and ethnicity; it tribalises the national question to the point of absurdity.” This is not semantic sloppiness. It is linguistic theatre in the service of foreign cartography.

 

 

Conclusion: The Imperial Repetition and the Task of Intellectual Resistance

What cloaks itself today in the vocabulary of rights, inclusion, and ethnic self-determination is a repetition, imperial in form, managerial in function. From the Ottoman Balkans to the post-Soviet Caucasus, the playbook has endured: construct a ‘multi-ethnic crisis’, manufacture consent for foreign intervention, and install governance models premised on tribal segmentation, externally managed diversity, and permanent fragmentation. Iran, long resistant to this design, now stands at the edge of its replication. That this script is being carried out not by foreign officials, but by Persian-speaking proxies and co-opted dissidents, merely attests to its sophistication.

 

Additionally, the latest iteration of this script is unfolding in Sudan. What began as a crisis of governance has mutated into a manufactured battlefield of tribalised militias, armed proxies, and de facto partition, each faction claiming legitimacy through ancestral identity, external patronage, and paramilitary presence. The same vocabulary, rights, representation, regional equity, is deployed there to mask a descent into statelessness. Iran, if subjected to similar ideological conditioning, faces a parallel risk: not only of soft fragmentation, but of strategic implosion, choreographed in the language of civic renewal.

 

The actors are now in place. NUFDI, posing as a civic platform, operationalises the political language. FDD, embedded in neoconservative strategic doctrine, supplies the ideological grammar. Figures like Brenda Shaffer perform the role of ethnographic cartographers, inscribing fabricated ethno-national boundaries onto a civilisational topography that has never known such partitions. And the Iranian Folk Congress, soft-spoken, adorned in ancestral theatre, endorsed by self-anointed tribal delegates, emerges as the provisional face of post-national management.

 

The danger is not just external. It is also internal. The repeated invocation of HIH Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, without structural clarity or institutional accountability, risks transforming a symbol of unity into a cipher for fragmentation. If the monarchy is to stand for coherence, it cannot become the branding device for soft balkanisation. A sovereign Iran cannot be built on borrowed legacies while surrendering its future to foreign-authored templates. Symbolism without resistance is mere theatre.

 

What must be asserted now is a new mode of intellectual resistance. This resistance does not defend the Islamic regime. Nor does it retreat into nostalgia. It refuses both the cynicism of the regime and the fantasies of its foreign-managed opposition. It recognises that the struggle is not simply over political control, but over the very ontology of Iran as a nation. Is it to be imagined as a civilisational polity with linguistic, regional, and theological plurality held within a shared civic grammar? Or will it be re-scripted as a field of tribes, each governed by foreign-aligned delegates, each speaking the language of rights while structurally denying the nation itself?

 

The answer will not emerge from declarations or think-tanks. It must be forged in intellectual labour, cultural memory, and political clarity. This is the task of our time: to interrupt the imperial repetition, to disarm the language of division, and to reclaim the conceptual infrastructure through which Iran can again be imagined on its own terms.

 

That task requires urgency. The instruments of fragmentation, policy papers, linguistic maps, congresses, shadow parliaments, are already operational. But so too is our capacity to resist them. The literature exists. The history exists. The unity, despite the endless efforts to unmake it, still exists. What is required now is not consensus, but courage. Not synthesis, but stance.

 

Let it be clear. The future of Iran will not be safeguarded by exile summits or foreign-funded platforms. It will be safeguarded by those who refuse to allow its name, its plurality, or its sovereignty to be rendered negotiable.

 

These operations are not accidental. They are coordinated, rehearsed, and ideologically sequenced. Under the banners of pluralism, they introduce cartographies of fracture. Under the language of democracy, they prepare the terrain for irreversible division. It is a refusal to allow a people, a culture, and a political tradition to be reduced to the chessboard of think-tank imperialism

 

 

Footnotes

1. Translation from the Persian: ‘Our ideal Iran distances itself from two dominant tendencies in Iranian thought, two tendencies which, at many points, converge. The first sees Iran as an “essence”, a view favoured by pan-Iranianists, which is dehistoricised and exclusive. In this view, Iran is a transhistorical totality that denies any role to non-Persian speakers in shaping an Iran defined only by its geographic, not cultural, scope. Our ideal Iran is not a culturally Persian Iran, but a fundamentally multicultural and historically constructed one. The second, which feeds off the first, is the Iranshahri model, this time in the form of a state-nation: a geographically bounded land, perpetually guarded by Iranian statesmen or Turkic elites assimilated into Iranism. In this Iranshahri view, protecting “Iran” is equated with establishing a powerful state, where the security of borders is prioritised over the security of Iran’s diverse peoples. In our view, protecting Iran means ensuring the existential safety of its peoples, yet the state is not the guarantor of this solidarity. It is evident that the state, as the rope of cohesion, can also be the architect of suppression and enforced homogenisation. Our ideal Iran is a historical and inherently multicultural one whose cohesion does not stem from mechanisms of suppression or assimilation, but from shared values and the collective flourishing of its plural constituents, values that emerge through discourses promoting the public good, and through institutions and groups that can give such discourses concrete form.’ Collective of signatories. (2018) ‘نامه‌ی ۴۱۰ فعال فعلی و سابق دانشجویی: با شما سخن می‌گوییم!’, Melliun Iran, 16 November. Available at: https://melliun.org/iran/186259 (Accessed: 1 November 2025).

 

 

References and bibliography

• Collective of signatories. (2018) ‘نامه‌ی ۴۱۰ فعال فعلی و سابق دانشجویی: با شما سخن می‌گوییم!’, Melliun Iran, 16 November. Available at: https://melliun.org/iran/186259 (Accessed: 1 November 2025).

• Mamdani, M. (2001) When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press.

• Hooman, A. (2025) ‘The Birth of the Iranian Folk Congress: A new chapter in Iran’s united fight for freedom’, NUFDI (31 October). Available at: https://nufdiran.org/iran_Uncensored/the-birth-of-the-iranian-folk-congress/ (Accessed: 01 November 2025).

• Scott, J. C. (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press.

• Shaffer, B. (2021) ‘Iran Is More Than Persia: Ethnic Politics in the Islamic Republic’, Foundation for Defense of Democracies Monograph, 28 April. Available at: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2021/04/28/iran-is-more-than-persia (Accessed: 01 November 2025).

• Sluga, G. (2013) Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism. University of Pennsylvania Press.

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (1998) ‘From Ethno-Nation To Multi-Ethnicity: The Fabricated Myth And Illusion Of ‘Ethnic’ And ‘Ethnicity’ In Modern Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (20 November). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/from-ethno-nation-to-multi-ethnicity-the-fabricated-myth-and-illusion-of-ethnic-and-ethnicity.html (Accessed: 01 November 2025).

• Suren-Pahlav. S., (2021) The Cyrus Accord as Myth and Strategy: Fabricated Antiquity, Foreign Power, and Iran’s Sovereignty, suren-pahlav.com (02 February). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-cyrus-accord-as-myth-and-strategy-fabricated-antiquity-foreign-power-and-iran-s-sovereignty.html (Accessed: 01 November 2025).

• Suren-Pahlav. S., (2022) ‘War of Maps and Misnomers: Brenda Shaffer, Empire’s Ethnographer, and the Strategic Balkanisation of Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (25 December). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/war-of-maps-and-misnomers-brenda-shaffer-balkanisation-of-iran.html (Accessed: 01 November 2025).

• Suren-Pahlav. S., (2025) ‘Deconstructing Iran's Emergency Phase: A Strategic Analysis of the First 100-180 Days of Post-Regime Transition’, suren-pahlav.com (2 August). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/deconstructing-iran-s-emergency-phase.html (Accessed: 01 November 2025).

• Tavakoli-Targhi, M. (2001) Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography. Palgrave Macmillan.

• Vali, A. (2011) ‘Ethnicities and Democratisation in Iran’, Third World Quarterly, 32(8), pp. 1519–1533.

• Iranian Folk Congress (2025) ‘بیانیه اعلام موجودیت کنگره اقوام ملی گرای ایران’, Iranian Folk Congress [online], 29 October. Available at: https://www.iranianfolk.org/بیانیه-ها-و-اطلاعیه-ها/بیانیه-اعلام-موجودیت-کنگره-اقوام-ملی-گرای-ایران (Accessed: 01 November 2025).